Spring is just around the corner, but Tamworth is just as beautiful when the town is blanketed in snow. Whether you’re on foot or cross-country skiing, there are just a few more weeks left to go out and take it all in.
Month: March 2015
It’s about time we sprinkled a little more rye into the pot to get our first batches of rye whiskey cooking.
By law, rye’s mash must consist of at least 51% rye. The additional rye adds a particular spice and dryness to the flavor, while corn adds sweetness, and barley drives the fermentation process.
To conjure up the past we’ve petitioned the future: a state-of-the-art 250 gallon custom-made copper still with a Scotch-style brandy helmet, a whisky column, a gin basket, four fermenters, six holding tanks, a hot water reclaiming system, a mash cooker…well we don’t want to give away all of our secrets but you get the idea!
The wide range of gear allows us to be many things at once: a Test Kitchen, a whiskey distiller, an Applejack fermenter, a maker of small-batch gins, eau du vies, and spirits hitherto unknown.
The visionary poet William Blake once wrote “what is now proved was once imagined.” When it comes to possibility of future spirits, the limits of our Test Kitchen and our own imaginations know no bounds.
It’s true that many of us may fit the bill of a “whiskey thief”, but in the distilling world it’s actually the name of a very useful tool. A whiskey thief is a long cylinder used to extract small portions of spirits from aging barrels for sampling and quality control. Many of our first batches have been aging since Fall of 2014, so we decided to check steal a sample to ensure the liquid was on it’s way to becoming a delicious spirit.
Here is a first look at Tamworth Distilling spirits wearing a beautiful new golden hue.
Well before Americans were distilling rye and bourbon, we were looking to our apple trees for a stiff boozy drink. With bountiful apple harvests in the Northeast, the sweet fruits were barreled and transformed into apple brandy, a well-rounded spirit that embodied autumn.
We decided to take the challenge by working to create an apple brandy that reflects the spirit of Tamworth, New Hampshire. We experimented with freshly picked local apples ranging from sweet Macintosh and Northern Spy to tart varieties like Delicious and Gravensteins.
After countless trials on the rotary evaporator, we moved into the distillery room where we’re now sealing our 11th batch of apple brandy composed of New Hampshire Macintosh and Cortland Apples.